


The kiss I would have spent on you

by saltedpin



Series: the sun also rises [1]
Category: Gintama
Genre: Angst, Developing Friendship, Multi, Pining, Silver Soul Arc, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unrequited Love, a little bit of casefic, ill-advised makeouts, stuff that hasn't yet been animated, sublimated feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-01-05 16:57:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21211952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltedpin/pseuds/saltedpin
Summary: There was no reason why the Demon Vice Commander and the Courtesan of Death should have crossed paths; and besides which, why would they have needed to, when Gintoki could so easily pass between both of their worlds, a gulf that had, at least until recently, seemed too vast to cross?Noble idiots attempt to out-noble idiot each other.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the poem _The Kiss_ by Kurt Brown:
> 
> That kiss I failed to give you.  
How can you forgive me?  
The kiss I would have spent on you is still  
There, within me. It will probably die there.  
But it will be the last of me to die.
> 
> Contains Silver Soul Arc spoilers, and stuff that hasn't been animated yet! 
> 
> This story is set during the time immediately after Utsuro is defeated and Gintoki decides to leave Edo, but before Hijikata goes off to the former site of the Shouka Sonjuku to look for him. Since we only find out about everything that’s happened in flashback two years later, I figure there’s a little wiggle room in the direct aftermath of the Bakufu’s collapse for this to have happened. 
> 
> Hijikata and Tsukuyo have so much in common that I think it’s a shame they never properly interacted, except for a few bits and pieces here and there - but I think it’s interesting that when Hijikata eventually follows Gintoki back to Edo, Hinowa knows who he is and tries to help him even though they never met on the screen :)
> 
> Thank you so much to rabbit_habits and Apathy for all their help and beta-ing! All mistakes are mine alone.

**I.**

There’s a thin crescent moon in the sky by the time Tsukuyo wakes from the few hours of sleep she usually manages to snatch between patrols. She’s still tired, a fatigue that feels like lead running through her veins weighing down her arm as she raises a hand to run her fingers through her hair, but it hardly seems to matter. There hasn’t been a moment in the last two months when she hasn’t felt tired, though perhaps it’s simply that now she feels it more than she usually would. 

She forces herself to her feet despite it and, aware of Hinowa and Seita sleeping in the next room, pads silently across the tatami to the butsudan by the wall. It’s become a habit before she goes out – kneeling before it, lighting the incense, and bowing her head. She’s never been religious or even agnostic, but this, she thinks, is the least she can do for the Hyakka who've been cut down obeying her orders, the women who’ve died to protect their home. The dead may grow more distant with each day, but Tsukuyo can at least offer them this – this small remembrance, a reassurance that to her, if very few others, they will never join the legions of the nameless, distant dead. 

She doesn’t close her eyes when she presses her palms together, watching the way the pale scars on her knuckles and across the backs of her hands pull at the skin; they are remnants of her childhood, unavoidable when making the first inexpert attempts to wield a kunai. Tsukuyo tries not to feel like a fraud in these moments – it’s still hard, after all, not to hear Jiraia’s voice the one time she had asked him about these things, after she had watched Hinowa bowing her head before the butsudan in her room. He had smirked at her and said, _What gods do you imagine would hear the prayers of people like us? And who do you imagine you’d be praying for?_

At the time, she had simply choked out the words _I don’t know,_ even as in her mind she’d instantly answered _Hinowa_; but she’d already seen the incandescence of Hinowa’s spirit in her eyes, a spirit that not even the seeping grime of Yoshiwara under Housen’s rule could diminish, and knew that Hinowa had no need of the prayers of a girl like her. 

Tsukuyo understands Jiraia’s words for what they are now, but the question still lingers nonetheless: who is she, with her scarred hands and stained soul, to sit here and pretend that there are any spirits or gods who would listen to her voice, much less grant her requests? 

There might still be a question mark at the end of that sentence, but Tsukuyo knows, at least, that she’s someone who still has a home to protect – still has people who depend upon her. Even here in the rubble of Edo, she still has the task she set herself to do before she even truly understood what it meant. Even so, it’s tempting to stay here just a moment longer, and then a moment after that, until the tug of duty within her heart pulls her upright. She doubts sometimes that she’s doing any good here; it sometimes feels like she’s trying to hold back water flooding through a burst pipe with her hands. It’s something else that doesn’t matter, though – she does what she does because it has to be done, and she doesn’t want it to fall onto anyone else’s shoulders. And so even on nights like these, when all she wants to do is sink back down into her futon and close her eyes and sleep, she raises her head, stands, slides open the door, and goes out into the blue dark of the night. 

**II.**

It’s raining the next morning, and though it’s become little more than a light drizzle by the time it reaches street level in Yoshiwara, it’s steady enough that the eaves of the shops are dripping wet, the smell of damp wood is in the air, and the women are using paper umbrellas to protect their hair. 

Tsukuyo lights her kiseru and leans back against the outside wall of a shop. Her feet ache, but even now, even after everything that’s happened, the business of Yoshiwara has barely slowed, and there are always men who need reminders, both gentle and not-so-gentle, to mind their manners. 

Just after dawn is the slowest part of the day, however, and she’s almost made up her mind to return to her rooms when she senses a change in the atmosphere – a surge of energy in the sluggish morning air, like a sleeping creature that has stirred to sudden, alert wakefulness. Tsukuyo looks up and sees the ripple of parting umbrellas in the street, hears the incongruously coy calls of _Lookin’ for a good time, honey?_ and _For you, I’d offer a discount,_ but evidently whatever man is passing by either isn’t in the market for fun or has a fetish for getting gouged on prices, since the parting of umbrellas doesn’t stop, and she hears the soft chides of _You don’t know what you’re missing, darling,_ as he moves on. She doesn’t care as long as he’s not making trouble, and she glances away, about to push herself up from the wall to go home, when she realises that the man, whoever he is, has stopped in front of her, a dark shape in her peripheral vision.

“Keep walking,” she murmurs, just loud enough for him to hear, and it’s only when he doesn’t that she gives him her full attention and then, with a jolt, recognises him. 

It _is_ him – Hijikata Toushirou, the Demon Vice Commander, standing with one wrist draped over the handle of his sword, his haori wet with the rain, and staring at her as if he’s trying to tell if she’s the person he’s looking for. Or sizing her up for a fight. 

Tsukuyo had known him as more than a name mainly because she’d heard Gintoki talk about him, usually briefly and insultingly – “_If you ever need a surly prick on call, he’s your man, but beyond that I don’t know what the use of him is,_” – since it had seemed that, for a man with Gintoki’s dubious legal standing, he’d spent _far_ too much time in the at least somewhat friendly company of the police. She’d once questioned him about the wisdom of this, but he’d simply given her a lazy wave of his hand and said, “_It’s fine, you wouldn’t believe the things that jackass owes me,_” and she’d known better than to try to persuade him further and let it drop. 

The Shinsengumi had never darkened the streets of Yoshiwara – at least, not while on duty – partially because Yoshiwara has always been autonomous and Housen would have carved them up for mincemeat for intruding on his turf, but _mostly_ because any arrests the Shinsengumi could have made here would only have embarrassed the government anyway. As far as she’d been concerned, the Shinsengumi had never been anything more than attack dogs for the Bakufu; but the Bakufu doesn’t exist anymore, and now they’re just dogs, sniffing around right where she doesn’t want them. She’d once told Seita off for saying the police in this country were going to hell, over his protests that that was what all the kids at temple school were saying and despite the fact she hadn’t wholly disagreed with the sentiment, but it all seems to matter very little now. Too much has happened for her to draw the petty lines in the sand she might have drawn before. 

Nonetheless, there’s no need to be overly friendly either, she thinks, as she watches a bead of water roll down his neck and into his collar.

“Is there something you want?”

His eyes flicker up to her face, and he withdraws his hand from his sleeve, flicking a small, square card onto the shop counter by her elbow. 

“This is a courtesy call,” he says. “Clean up your mess, or I’ll clean it up for you.”

Tsukuyo pauses before she picks up the card between two fingers, making a show of touching it as little as possible. It’s flecked with blood – she supposes she doesn’t need to ask where that came from – and in its centre is the swooping curve of a crescent moon, printed in pitch-black ink. 

The Black Crescent. She’s heard the name and knows who they are: the leftovers of the Harusame, deserters, the ones with too great a sense of self-preservation to’ve let the Tendoushuu tell them what to do. They’ve been creeping like weeds into the open spaces left behind by their former comrades, substituting one poetic-sounding name for another and continuing to do what they’ve always done, dealing in drugs, weapons, slaves and anything else they can get their hands on. 

It's clear that to Hijikata's way of thinking, if the Black Crescent have set up here then it’s because she’s either failed to notice them or because she’s allowing it. She’s hardly about to take his word for it that they're here, however, and Tsukuyo’s not sure if he’s trying to insult her by forcing her to ask what the card means, or if his silence means he expects that she already knows, one way or another. Whatever the case, she taps the ash from her kiseru before she answers him, fixing him with an unimpressed stare. 

“A courtesy call, huh.” She raises an eyebrow. “Are you trying to scare me? The Shinsengumi don’t exist anymore.”

There’s a cold flash in his eye. “If I wanted you to be scared of me, you would be. And I’m not here as the Shinsengumi.”

Gintoki really hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d called him a surly prick. But despite that, he’d still willingly spent his time with him apparently, and Hijikata had more than once been dragged into Gintoki’s elaborate messes, so she’s willing to believe there has to be something other than _surly prick_ to him, even if it’s not readily apparent at this exact moment. The other times she’s heard his name spoken haven’t been any more complimentary – Jouishishi muttering that the Shinsengumi had arrested their comrades, or criminals warning each other off certain dates, or the word that had gone around in the early days of Nobu Nobu’s ascendancy: _the Demon Vice Commander’s a regular beat cop now and so broken up over his gorilla boss that if you wanted his head, you could probably just walk up and take it; hell, he’d probably thank you_. 

She swallows. 

It hadn’t been her concern at the time. Politics have never concerned her (she hadn’t intended to get involved in a coup that time – she had only wanted to force a rotten man to keep the promise he’d made to the mistress he’d long since discarded). It was a parade of one rotten man after another, none of whom cared about any of the things she cared about. 

But this – her eyes flicker down to the card between her fingers, anger simmering in her stomach – _this_ she cares about. She’s responsible for this, and she can acknowledge that not having known about it is at least half the reason for her anger. These are her streets, and the things that happen on them happen under her watch. He’s right, and this _is_ her mess to clean up, her house to keep in order. By coming to her first rather than charging in himself, swinging his sword around like a barbarian and creating an even bigger mess, she supposes Hijikata is, at least, acknowledging that. The thought curls her lip, a sour taste on her tongue; if he’s trying to be polite, this is probably the least effective way to go about it, though she’s not sure, given his reputation, why she should expect any different. 

Raising her eyes, she opens her mouth to tell him she’ll take care of it, but he’s already turning away, moving back through the crowd, the wall of paper umbrellas closing up again behind him. 

**III.**

The Black Crescent are surprisingly easy to find, once she begins looking. It’s the usual: money laundering through shopfronts in Yoshiwara, with staff who’re on the books as courtesans but who turn out to be Amanto with illegal weapons and bad attitudes, guarding crates stamped with a black crescent moon.

Tsukuyo feels both gratified and indignant – gratified that they’re so easily rooted out but indignant that she should have let this slip past her. 

_It’s because you allowed yourself to be diverted from your path. It’s because you became distracted by thoughts of –_

She cuts the thought off before it can fully form. She no longer believes these things, but it’s surprisingly difficult to break the habit of this way of thinking. 

In any case, the Amanto she corners talks easily enough once she has the point of her tantou pressed to his throat and tells her that their shipments aren’t coming through Yoshiwara, but through Edo Harbour and transported here later. It’s enough for her to let him live, his running footsteps fading on the street outside as she leans down to pick up one of the cards that the Black Crescent carry as identification. It’s identical to the one Hijikata had flicked at her, of course, except the blood on hers is fresh and bright red, smeared wetly across the dark crescent on its face. 

Tsukuyo turns it over in her fingers before tucking it into her obi – her back protests as she rises, and she can feel knots of fatigue in her shoulders, a tiredness that seems to want to pull her down into the ground she’s standing on. She doesn’t let herself yawn as she signals to the naginata-wielding Hyakka standing by the door that they can go in and start cleaning up the mess. The shift leader, Etsuko, pauses before she goes in, her eyes narrowed, even if the rest of her expression is concealed behind the black fabric of her mask.

“Is there anything else I can do, Tsukuyo?”

Tsukuyo lowers her eyes as she lights her kiseru, telling herself Etsuko can’t see the way her fingers ever so slightly shake, the flame of the match wobbling as she touches it to the tip of the pipe.

_I’m just tired,_ she thinks. _I’ll sleep longer tonight._

“No,” she says, exhaling a long, thin stream of smoke, then frowns. “But I need to go up into Edo for a few hours. I won’t be long.” 

It’s been a while since she’s ventured out into the streets of Edo – she’s let many of the Hyakka who still have contact with their families return home to help with the clean-up, but it’s meant that she’s had to spend most of her waking hours on the streets of Yoshiwara, watching over their patrol routes. 

She smokes as she walks, kiseru balanced in her fingers, through the rubble-strewn streets, the districts left in ruins first by the Altana Liberation Army and then the monster Utsuro. The rains have washed the streets clean and put out the remaining fires, leaving people to dig through the shattered remains of their former homes. 

Tsukuyo isn’t certain where she’ll find him, so she picks her way towards Kabukichou, finding a path through the wreckage of the city. The sun is out, the day isn’t yet at the height of its humidity, and there are plenty of people out on the streets, but none of them pay her any mind, too preoccupied with heaving buckets of rubble along in human chains to be dumped into shipping containers and hauled away. The taste of ash and dust coats her tongue, sticking in her throat when she tries to swallow it away. It reminds her of the fire in Yoshiwara and how the acrid stench of charred wood and burned plastic had lingered for months, since even then Housen wouldn’t allow the roof to be opened to let the smoke escape. 

She could send more of the Hyakka to help here, she thinks – any of them would volunteer, and she can take their places in the streets of Yoshiwara. If she returns before noon from the morning patrol, she can sleep for half an hour before going out again for the afternoon shift, and then perhaps she can –

She stops in her tracks as she reaches the end of the rubble-transporting human chain. For an organisation that no longer has any official standing, the Shinsengumi do seem to be awfully attached to their uniforms, though most of them have shed the long black jacket and are passing the buckets of debris to each other in their vests and shirtsleeves. Tsukuyo glances around – where there’s Shinsengumi, there has to be someone telling them what to do – before her eye finally falls on him, standing with his jacket slung over his shoulder as he leans down to scrutinise a map being held by a tall, bald man with sweat shining on the dome of his head. 

There’s no need to interrupt, Tsukuyo supposes, so she waits, standing and smoking until he apparently senses her eyes on him, turning to look at her, his back stiffening. At least he doesn’t make her wait, saying something to his bald friend before making his way over to her, his face stony. 

“Over here,” he says, jerking his head and walking behind a pile of rubble, as if he expects her to join him. 

She follows him, rankled though she is, but she takes her time about it. “Ashamed to be seen talking to a woman of Yoshiwara?”

“It’s not that.” He doesn’t say what it _is_, however, though Tsukuyo notices one of the other officers, some baby-faced boy who barely looks old enough to be out of school, let alone in the Shinsengumi, staring after them with slightly narrowed eyes, and she wonders if that might have something to do with it. She doesn’t feel like explaining to him, however, that if he’s worried about his men thinking he’s keeping a secret woman, then bundling her off behind a pillar of rubble to have a clandestine conversation is hardly likely to allay anyone’s suspicions. 

“What do you want?” 

The answer she gives him is to untuck the Black Crescent calling card from her obi and flick it towards him. He doesn’t even make an attempt to catch it, so it bounces off his shoulder and flutters to the ground by his feet. She assumes he’ll know it’s not the same one he gave her, since the bloodstains are different.

“It’s not just my mess,” she says, “though my part of it is cleaned up now. Maybe you should be keeping a closer eye on the harbour.”

His eyes flicker down to the card, eyebrows drawing together beneath the dark swoop of hair that hangs down over his forehead. “The harbour?”

Obviously, he heard her so she’s not going to repeat herself, taking a long draw on her pipe instead, watching him, noticing the grey sickles of shadow beneath his eyes. A moment later, she realises with a jolt that she recognises them – because they’re the same as the ones she sees beneath her own eyes when she wakes after too few hours of sleep, and goes to a mirror to dully scrape her hair back from her face before she heads out to patrol. 

“If that’s all, I’ll be going.” Her voice sounds crisp and sharp even to her own ears, but she can’t really bring herself to care – _he_ was the one, after all, who came barging into Yoshiwara telling her to clean up her mess, and perhaps she _had_ let some rats creep in under her nose, but not before they’d crept in under his first. She thinks she’s entitled to a little snippiness. 

Hijikata glances up at her – and he does at least have the grace to look a little sheepish, though it’s quickly cancelled out by the scowl that crosses his face. He glares at her, reminding her, absurdly, of a cat that’s just been rubbed the wrong way and hasn’t made up its mind yet about how much more of such treatment it’s going to put up with. 

“Thank you,” he finally gets out, as if he has to dredge the words up from some long-forgotten corner of his vocabulary. He stoops, picking up the card, turning it over in his hand before sliding it into his pants pocket. “I’ll… take care of it.” 

Somehow, she can sense something unspoken in the air – the knowledge that ordinarily she might have asked Gintoki for help with this, or even if she hadn’t, he would have found a way to involve himself anyway. Tsukuyo isn’t certain why, but she knows that the Shinsengumi Vice Commander knows it – but then, she supposes, ordinarily he wouldn’t have put in an appearance himself in Yoshiwara. 

The Shinsengumi had often been on the side of a law that concerned itself very little with justice, and she had spent her life meting out a justice that was well beyond the bounds of any law. There was no reason why the Demon Vice Commander and the Courtesan of Death should have crossed paths; and besides which, why would they have needed to, when Gintoki could so easily pass between both of their worlds, a gulf that had, at least until recently, seemed too vast to cross? 

Things have changed now, Tsukuyo thinks, as she looks down at the ground, the rubble that lies at her feet. It seems stupid that she should think of herself as an outsider here, after all that has passed, and she feels the prickle of responsibility creeping down her spine. 

There’s no law now, no shougun, no Bakufu, and very nearly no Edo. _And Gintoki…._

Like it or not, she’s part of this place now; her blood is here amongst the ruins of the city too, soaked into the ground along with everyone else’s who bled to save it. Her life has been tangled with theirs, perhaps irrevocably. 

“I’ll come with you,” she says suddenly, catching even herself somewhat by surprise. “Tell me when, and I’ll be there.”

Hijikata stares at her as if she’s just blabbered out something utterly incomprehensible or sprouted an extra head or something else equally unlikely, and Tsukuyo feels irritation and impatience rise up within her, her tiredness making her less inclined to suppress them than she ordinarily might be.

“Or I won’t, suit yourself,” she snaps, turning, her fists clenched by her side. She can feel a flush of anger creeping up her neck – anger at him, but also at herself for offering her help when it so obviously isn’t wanted. 

“Tomorrow night, then. Here.” 

His voice stops her cold in her tracks. She swallows, nods once, and continues on her way, the rubble crunching beneath her boots.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading - I was just suddenly seized with the need to write Hijikata and Tsukuyo interacting. 
> 
> Part two will be up hopefully in a week or so :)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The amazing deargodwhatisthatthing has drawn a beautiful (and oddly prescient :D) piece of artwork that was inspired by this story -- do yourself a favour and go look!: [Absence, the highest form of presence](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21281204).

**IV.**

Tsukuyo had once thought that any object in Edo’s propensity to explode depended on its current proximity to Gintoki; that had been a mistake, she thinks now, in the moment before she hits the water with a _slap_ that forces the breath from her lungs, sets her ears ringing, and leaves her right side feeling like it’s been slammed into a wall.

Still, being underwater is a _good_ thing, because at least it means she isn’t on fire, which had been a closer-run thing than she would have liked. No thanks, she thinks, to Hijikata and whatever insanity had convinced him that bringing literally zero other Shinsengumi but exactly one bazooka to this fight was a good idea. 

Whatever else the Black Crescent are, they aren’t subtle – or perhaps it’s just that they don’t feel the need for it, since most of Edo is lying destroyed, and who even knows who’s in charge anymore? Or maybe the problem is her, Tsukuyo thinks as she kicks her feet, trying to free them from her boots, and a wave breaks over her head, filling her mouth with salty, oily water. Maybe she’s too used to the Yoshiwara way of doing things – the quiet knife in the alleyway, the kunai drawn over the carotid artery, the blade slipped between the atlas and the axis and withdrawn without a sound. Men were dead before they knew they were ever a target to begin with. That was the shinobi way – the Oniwabanshuu way that Jiraia had trained her in. But then, that’s why the Bakufu had created them: if you wanted something done quickly and quietly without anyone knowing it had been done, you called a shinobi. If you wanted a warehouse full of illegal weaponry and hoarded fuel blown up with enough force to send the roof spinning upwards into the sky, you called a samurai. Apparently. 

Or maybe that’s just Gintoki, Hijikata, and every other samurai Tsukuyo has ever had anything to do with. At this point, she doesn’t care. 

Her head breaks through the surface of the water again, the smell of burning oil so thick in the air she can feel it coating her tongue, filling her throat, choking her. Submerging herself again is almost preferable – at least until she pulls herself up into the open air once more to heave in a thick, chemical-scented breath that leaves her throat burning in its wake. 

Blinking the saltwater out of her eyes and shoving her hair back, Tsukuyo treads water, looking around. There’s a blazing fire on the edge of the docks and bits of burning debris strewn about her in the water, but at least the Black Crescent won’t be bothering them again – which, she supposes, however sourly, is what she wanted. 

And _she_, at least, can swim – Jiraia had been an Iga-raised ninja and would have considered himself remiss not to include it as part of her training, but Tsukuyo has no idea whether the Shinsengumi included swimming lessons. She doesn’t see Hijikata anywhere around here despite the fact she’s _fairly_ certain he went into the water with her when the barrels of fuel blew up. 

She’s just beginning to get worried when Hijikata’s head breaks the surface of the water, his dark hair plastered to his scalp, and, ridiculously, a sodden, drooping cigarette still clenched between his teeth. It flies into the water as he sputters for air, his palms slapping the surface as he flails to keep himself afloat, before he disappears once more into the blackness of the deep harbour water. Tsukuyo takes a moment to roll her eyes before she gulps down what little oxygen she can from the fuel-infused air and dives down into the water, its salt stinging her open eyes – though at least the burning wreckage is providing enough illumination that she can see Hijikata’s back slowly descending into the depths. She darts out a hand and grabs his collar, hauling him up after her through the water, though the effort of dragging him upwards forces some of the air out of her lungs and through her clenched teeth, a furious stream of bubbles surging in front of her eyes. 

As she kicks her legs and beats her free arm through the water, fingers cupped, she vows, _Never again. Never, ever again._

If she wants a job done properly, she’ll just do it herself. 

Emerging into the burning air, Tsukuyo pulls in a choking breath, lungs on fire, her wet clothes dragging heavily in the water. The only thing she can say is that at least it isn’t cold, though she isn’t exactly sure why she’s trying to find any bright side to having to drag a half-drowned ex-policeman through the filthy waters of Edo Harbour to escape the burning warehouse that he just blew up. 

“Usually when people plan a daring water escape they at least make sure they can swim first,” she mutters, sweeping her right arm through the water and curling her left around his shoulders; it would be preferable, she supposes, if his head remained unsubmerged, but at this precise moment she can’t really say she’s fussy.

“I can swim,” comes the rasping, sputtering reply a moment later, and Tsukuyo, in her outrage, almost lets him go – _If he can swim, then why is he letting me haul him across the harbour like a sodden sack of laundry?!_ – but as she turns her head to snap those exact words at him, she sees the blood that runs down his forehead from the thick gash just below his hairline, visible now that his hair isn’t drooping down over his face and the water hasn’t washed away the blood. There’d been debris enough flying around in the aftermath of the explosion – though that had been ninety per cent his fault – and she supposes _a massive, disorienting head wound_ is reason enough to forget how to swim.

Gritting her teeth, Tsukuyo adds _ducking_ to her mental list of things samurai apparently can’t do – alongside _shutting up_, _doing something quietly without causing a fuss_, and _watching children’s movies without crying_ – before she realises who, exactly, she’s describing, and snaps her thoughts back on the very tight leash she’s been keeping them on these past few weeks. 

“Fine,” she mutters, “fine,” and keeps kicking her legs, ignoring the fatigue in her limbs and the ache in her shoulder the same way she always does. It’s easy to keep making these same repetitive motions, to keep moving steadily through the water if she simply tells herself this is what her arms and legs are _for_, that there’s nothing more to her than the need to keep swimming, as if she’s a machine designed for the purpose. 

This, at least, is something that Jiraia had given her that she hasn’t tried to discard – the hours he’d spent knocking her down and telling her to get up, over, and over, and over again, no matter how hard her legs had shaken or how desperately she had wanted to stay where she was, curled in a ball on the tatami, her head pounding, her body little more than a tender mass of bruises.

Compared with that, what is this? _Just a swim. A relaxing midnight swim._

She’s so focused on the steady, repetitive motions of swimming that she almost hits her head on the concrete of the dock when she finally reaches it. Here, at least, the air is clearer, smelling mostly of salt and a hint of fish, and she gulps it down gratefully as she clings to the rough edge of the dock, her fingers numb, shoulders aching. She glances behind her – she hasn’t been paying much attention, but she assumes Hijikata hasn’t drowned or bled to death – and pulls him around, bumping his shoulder into the wall with the strong implication that he should grab hold of it, because she isn’t going to hold him up anymore.

Whatever the case, he seems to take the hint, and maybe he’s in better shape than she thought because he reaches up, grasping the edge, and then pulls himself up with only a small amount of inelegant flailing. She wants to follow him up, but her muscles feel frozen, stuck in a state of permanent contraction. She belatedly realises that she’s shivering, her teeth chattering, the warmth of the evening doing nothing against the cold blackness of the water. She’s so tired she thinks she could go to sleep right here – just close her eyes and let go of the concrete wall and sink into the water as she sinks into sleep. 

In the next moment, however, she feels hands beneath her arms, hears the scrabble of feet slipping against concrete, and then she’s hauled out of the water – clumsily, jerkily – until she flops like a newly landed fish, half onto the cold, coarse concrete of the docks and half onto Hijikata’s sodden, gasping form – which is, at least, warmer than the concrete, if not by much.

A curl of disgust unwinds in her stomach at the contact – or, rather, she realises after a moment, it’s an empty space within her where the disgust at touching a man would once have been. She doesn’t know if its absence means she’s finally rid herself of that part of Jiraia’s teachings or if she’s simply too exhausted to care, but in either case she stays where she is, breath heaving, her open palm resting on Hijikata’s chest, until her shivering begins to subside, and she feels she can sit up. 

The first thing she does is gaze out to where the warehouse fire is still blazing merrily away. Against the flames, she can see the scurrying silhouettes of what she assumes are the Black Crescent members who survived both the kunai she’d thrown – in the moments when she’d still thought they were going to do this sensibly – and then the explosion, when Hijikata had apparently decided that they weren’t. Another time, she might have gone after them, but right now, she realises it’s not a situation she would walk away from alive – and, moreover, that it would be pointless. 

“This is a disaster,” she says, staring at the smoke and sparks drifting up into the night sky. 

“At least it’s done,” Hijikata mutters, and she senses rather than sees him sitting up behind her, wet clothes making a slithering sound as he moves. 

She glances at him, lip curling – she had known the standards for the Shinsengumi were low, but she hadn’t thought they were quite _that_ low. “You couldn’t have brought someone with you? Or would that have just resulted in an even bigger explosion and even more flames?”

Hijikata might be half-drowned and bleeding from the gash on his forehead, but he still manages to shoot her a scathing glare. “Maybe that would’ve been better – it would’ve got the message across.”

She shakes her head. Their methods are diametrically opposed, but he has a point: the Black Crescent’s stores have been destroyed, and in a loud enough and messy enough way that hopefully whatever others are out there will get the message – that the people of Edo might be bruised and bloody, but they aren’t beaten yet. 

_And next time, I might even notice them._

It’s irritation with herself that makes her blurt out, “So, if I hadn’t offered to come with you, you’d have just kicked open the door to the warehouse by yourself? I hope your Shinsengumi enjoy fishing corpses out of the harbour – yours, specifically – since I don’t know what else you expected to happen.” 

Hijikata glowers at her, the corner of his mouth twitching, but she knows he hardly has a comeback for her words. “The Shinsengumi are busy with other things right now,” he eventually mutters, looking away. “If you wanted company, why didn’t you bring the Hyakka?”

Tsukuyo opens her mouth to spit her answer back at him – _Edo needs the Hyakka for the rebuilding efforts right now_ – until she realises that she’s basically echoing his words about the Shinsengumi, and shuts her mouth so suddenly her teeth click together. The truth of it is, they both could have brought others with them here tonight, and they both chose not to. Tsukuyo forces her eyes away from his face, across the water to where the fire seems, finally, to be starting to burn itself out. Releasing a long breath, she gathers her legs under her, standing shakily, the concrete rough against the soles of her bare feet. She doesn’t have the energy to hold onto her annoyance, and from what she’s been able to glean about his personality, he seems to be one of those ‘quick to anger, quick to subside’ types. He doesn’t join her in standing, though; remaining where he is, he lifts his arm, scrubbing his sleeve over his eyes, wiping away the blood that’s trickled into them.

Tsukuyo hesitates a moment, and then reaches for the sodden length of the long sleeve of her kimono, tearing a strip from the hem. “Here,” she says, kneeling down to wrap it around his head, covering the gash with the cloth. He doesn’t say anything, but she registers the surprise that flickers in his eyes as he stares at her, blinking, as if having a wound tended to is a strange and new experience that he’s not quite sure he likes yet. 

“Thanks,” he says eventually, once she’s pulled her hands back. She straightens as he stands; without her boots on he’s still only a little taller than her. They must look ridiculous, she realises, standing here, soaked to the bone, staring at a subsiding fire that they set in the first place, a puddle of disgusting harbour water slowly expanding around their feet. 

“We should go.”

Tsukuyo nods, but she doesn’t turn away from him; he looks a mess, and part of her wants to ask him if he has far to walk to get back to wherever he spends his evenings. She bites back the question, only to have him wave slightly at her bare feet.

“Can you walk back home like that?”

“I’ve gone home worse.”

He lets out a slight exhalation, which might possibly be standing in for a laugh, before he starts patting his pockets – she realises what he’s looking for a moment later when he pulls a soggy box of cigarettes out of his sleeve. A tiny rivulet of water trickles out when he opens it, but he still looks inside anyway, as if, miraculously, there might be a smokable cigarette inside. 

“Shit.” 

She’d laugh if he didn’t look so pathetic; if she couldn’t see the slight rise and fall of his shoulders as he – maybe – sighs and puts the cigarette box away, before raising his sleeve to wipe his face again, blinking as if he still has blood in his eyes. 

It’s a thoughtless gesture as she begins to reach up to wipe the blood from his forehead, but a sudden wariness stays her hand – a dark foreboding that curls up from her stomach, like a premonition of some as yet distant and unknown danger; the echo of something she called out long ago, and is only now hearing repeated. She pauses, uncertain, and then curls her fingers against her palm and drops her arm to her side, leaving him to wipe off his own bloody face. 

**V.**

“Oh, Tsukki,” Hinowa says, a small smile on her lips as she raises her head when Tsukuyo comes in through the front door. 

It’s the smile that warns Tsukuyo to be on her guard.

Two weeks have passed since she dragged herself home from the docks, looking like a drowned rat and smelling worse. Of course, Hinowa had stuck her head into the bathroom just as Tsukuyo had been hunched over beneath the tap trying to scrub viscous, oily water out of her hair, her clothes a sodden heap in the corner, reeking of burning chemicals, harbour water, and whatever filth she’d picked up during her walk home. Hinowa hadn’t said anything; she’d just stared at her for a moment as Tsukuyo had opened and closed her mouth, her mind scrabbling about for an explanation, and then pulled her head back and closed the door without saying a word. In an idle moment, Tsukuyo had found herself wondering if Hijikata had faced much the same reception when he’d dragged himself back to wherever he went home to, soaking wet, blood on his face, part of a woman’s sleeve wrapped around his forehead – but then, she hasn’t heard of anything in Edo blowing up recently, so maybe he died of his head wound. 

Since then, Tsukuyo has often turned to find Hinowa’s eyes on her, a shadow of concern between her eyebrows, her lips pulled down into an infinitesimal frown – the same look she gets when she’s slowly chewing over a complicated recipe or a difficult maths question on Seita’s homework. 

So it’s with no small amount of caution that Tsukuyo now hesitates warily in the doorway, one hand still resting on the frame, and says, “Yes?”

“I’m afraid I’ve done it again.” Hinowa ducks her head in an embarrassed contrition Tsukuyo is certain she doesn’t even slightly feel. “I always cook too much. You and me and Seita can’t possibly eat all of this. Will you take it to someone who might need it?” She gestures to her wheelchair. “You know I’d take it myself, but I’ve left it too late. I wouldn’t be back before dawn even if I left right now.”

Tsukuyo frowns. “I have patrol –”

“Oh, that.” Hinowa waves a hand, as if Tsukuyo is talking about nothing especially important. “I’ve already spoken to Etsuko, and she says she’ll handle things tonight. So there’s no need for you to worry – all right?”

There’s a sharp edge in Hinowa’s voice that warns Tsukuyo not to argue, and so she takes the wrapped-up bentou from the bench and heads out, just as the last of the sunlight fades from the streets. She’s not certain where exactly the emergency centres have been set up, but she knows who will – and she knows that Hinowa knows this as well, which is the exact reason she’s asking her to do this. 

Hinowa thinks she’s helping by sending her out here, of course, the way she always wants to help, but Tsukuyo wishes she would simply let things lie and leave her to lick her wounds in peace. 

Guilt curdles in her stomach even as the thought enters her head – perhaps Hinowa _would_ let her lick her wounds in peace, if that was what she was doing. But as it is, Tsukuyo knows she’s been exhausting herself, pushing herself to her limits and beyond them, denying that she even _has_ limits that, sooner or later, she will have to acknowledge. Even now, exhaustion crawls through her, burrowing into the very marrow of her bones, but how can she explain this to Hinowa? Hinowa’s spirit had persevered despite everything – despite all the things that she had endured, all the things that Housen had done to her, never once had she allowed any of it to touch the core of who she was, who she knew herself to be. The light in her eyes had never dimmed, never once even flickered, and Tsukuyo is uncertain how to tell her that she had been so sure she’d die on the battlefield that Edo had become that it has taken her some time to recall the promises she’d made, the promises she intends to keep. 

Tsukuyo forces herself not to dawdle as she makes her way through the Edo streets – she’s not that pathetic, she tells herself, to put off doing something that needs to be done due to a lingering tightness in her chest, the strange fear that going back there engenders in her. She’s been back before, so she’s not sure why each time it gets harder. It seems contrary to sense: surely, knowing what to expect – the caved-in roof, the cracked façade, the drooping sign, the knowledge that he won’t be there – should make it easier? Good sense has never mattered when it comes to this, though – but she won’t let herself slow down, so it isn’t long until she’s standing in front of the Snack House Otose, looking up at what remains of the office of Yorozuya Gin-chan. 

It looks even more broken-down and abandoned in the pale moonlight than it does in the full light of day, and for a moment, Tsukuyo hesitates, uncertain. Could Otose have decided to cut her losses and move on? It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing she would do, but surely even Otose, with all her fortitude, can’t live in a derelict building that looks on the verge of collapsing at any moment. 

As soon as the thought crosses her mind, the door slides open with a halting, jerky movement, guided by a gnarled set of fingers; Otose appears a moment later, a fork in one hand and a small tin can in the other. As Tsukuyo watches, she begins tapping the fork gently against the can, calling _Here then, you good-for-nothing cat, your dinner’s ready,_ in a voice so soft and low that Tsukuyo can barely make out the words. 

She hesitates a moment before approaching, uncertainty making her gait halting, but Otose shows no surprise when she comes to stand beside her, merely glancing up and giving her a small nod. 

“A stray,” Otose says by way of explanation, holding up the can. “I’ve been feeding him for the past couple of weeks. There’s a lot of them around these days. But it seems like he’s disappeared again. I didn’t see him last night either.” 

“Oh. I see.”

The old woman crouches down, placing the can of cat food beneath the broken beams of the stairs. “I suppose that’s the thing about taking in strays. You can feed them and pet them and spoil them, sometimes for years, but in some corner of their minds they’ll never forget they were strays, and they’ll always have one eye on the door, just waiting for you to leave it open.” Otose stands slowly and looks at Tsukuyo, raising a hand and holding her thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Even the tiniest crack.” 

Tsukuyo swallows, looking down, uncertain of what Otose expects her to say, holding the boxes of food in front of her as if they might shield her from what she fully understands are the implications of her words. 

“I know you’ll know who needs this, Otose-san,” she finally says, awkwardly holding out the wrapped bentou, hoping that Otose will simply take them and let her go. 

“Ah. From Hinowa, I assume.” Otose reaches out, accepting them. “Please thank her from me. She’s been very generous. I can’t tell you how much it’s meant to us.” 

Tsukuyo nods and promises that she will, and Otose waves her hand vaguely and shuffles inside, not seeming to notice the way the doorframe sags or the way the door no longer slides all the way shut. Tsukuyo stands outside for a moment, looking down at the long, thin sliver of light that escapes through the gap and spreads itself along the ground, her eyes following it until it dissipates, fading into nothingness, swallowed up by the darkness of the night. It reminds her of something, though her brain feels muddled, and she can’t for the life of her think what.

She knows she should return to Yoshiwara, to Hinowa, but she stays where she is as if rooted to the spot, seemingly unable to force herself to turn away. Otose might be a fixture here, but Tsukuyo had noticed the streak of grey beginning to show in her jet-black hair, the way she’d stooped when she took the bentou from her. She is old, and Kabukichou has always been a lawless town, perhaps even more so now than it’s ever been, and it doesn’t seem right that Tsukuyo should leave an old lady – even if the old lady is Otose – alone in such a place. 

“No, thank you.” Otose’s voice rings out suddenly from inside as Tsukuyo still stands there, hesitating over whether to stay or go. “Go home and go to bed. And tell the other one over there to clear off as well.”

Embarrassment cinches in Tsukuyo’s stomach, even as she wonders what Otose means; she turns away, still not understanding, until a movement in the alley across the way catches her eye, the slow rise and fall of a lit cigarette, a hazy circle of orange, bright against the darkness. At one point she would have thought, _Well, obviously, the police are staking out Gintoki’s house – they have every reason to do so, and Gintoki can’t seem to help himself from getting in their way,_ and walked on, but now she finds herself wondering what business Hijikata could possibly have here. 

For no reason other than curiosity she crosses the street, until she’s standing just before the deep shadow of the alley, the moonlight cut off by the shattered remains of whatever massage parlour or bar or other den of ill repute had once stood there. 

“I assume you heard what Otose-san said,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest and staring into the gloom; it’s a moment before Hijikata emerges slightly, cigarette between his fingers. “What are you doing here?”

A scowl crosses his face. “I could ask you the same thing.”

“Hinowa sent me. I didn’t want to come.” She can hear the defensiveness in her own voice, and she tries to relax her fingers, removing the points of her nails from her own arms. “And you didn’t answer my question. I’m assuming it’s not Shinsengumi business.”

He stares at her for a long moment before looking away, taking a long drag on his cigarette. Just as she’s almost certain he’s not going to answer her, he says, “Kondou-san is staying at the Shimura doujou for now. Hell if I know where Sougo is.” 

She glances behind her, looking through the darkness across the road to the former Yorozuya office. She knows who Kondou is, of course, though it takes her a moment longer to place Sougo, before she remembers the baby-faced boy who’d narrowed his eyes at them the day she’d gone to find him at the clearing site. The words _That still doesn’t answer my question_ sit on the tip of her tongue, but she leaves them there, unspoken. 

“The Shimura doujou,” she says instead. “Does your boss know about the way Otae-san cooks?”

Hijikata lets out a low snort around the fresh cigarette he’s lighting. “He knows. He doesn’t care. He’d learn to cook himself before he asked her to change.” He inhales, the end of the cigarette glowing brighter for a moment. “He said he just wants to keep an eye on things there. That Shinpachi kid is still here every morning, though.”

She doesn’t ask how he knows that; it would be a stupid, unnecessary question, but she does wonder how much time he spends here, watching, and how many times before now Otose has told him to clear off. And she can’t say it surprises her to know that Shinpachi still comes here, as if he’s coming in for his shift every morning, the same way Gintoki had always complained about him doing when he’d been trying to sleep off a hangover. 

Taking out her kiseru, she fills it and lights it, lifting it to her lips as she moves forward to join Hijikata in the shadow of the alley. She exhales a thin stream of smoke, reflecting that Otose is probably aware that neither of them have moved off yet, with the strange, uncanny sixth sense that all old ladies seem to possess but Otose doubly so. Tsukuyo doesn’t want to bother her, but neither does she want to go just yet; she’s not sure why, since she was so unenthusiastic about coming in the first place, but now that she’s here, she finds herself reluctant to leave. Leaning over, she rests her shoulder against the cool concrete of the wall beside her, lifting her kiseru to her lips once more.

Hijikata says nothing – if he minds her staying, there’s nothing about the way he stands that gives it away. He doesn’t even turn his head to look at her, but the silence feels nonetheless companionable – something shared and soft like the smoke that wends its way through the darkness before drifting out into the street. The light in Otose’s window goes out, the stripe that had been extending partway across the street extinguished, leaving no illumination but the moonlight, and then the glow of Hijikata’s lighter as he lights another cigarette. 

Nothing happens; nothing moves. Tsukuyo is used to entire nights spent like this – alone in the shadows, watching, waiting, observing, and the nights when she doesn’t have to lift a finger are the good ones. It’s strange having someone beside her now, a shoulder only a few inches from her own, the warmth of a body where usually there’d be only empty space. It’s strange, but Tsukuyo can’t say she dislikes it – though perhaps if they were in Yoshiwara, things would be different.

Tsukuyo stiffens slightly at a movement across the street, and senses Hijikata beside her doing the same – it had barely been anything at all, perhaps simply the _sense_ of movement rather than movement itself. But after a moment she sees it again, a small, pale shape descending through the darkness, making its way down from the balcony of the Yorozuya Gin-chan before trickling like water over the broken stairs and coming to land by Otose’s front door.

_The stray,_ Tsukuyo realises, with a blink of surprise. _So it did come back to her after all._

The little cat trots to the can Otose had left for it under the stairs, crouching to eat, before it lifts its head and unhurriedly cleans its whiskers. Tsukuyo watches it as it stands, its tail curling, before it slips its way in through the gap in the door and disappears; it’s tempting, she thinks, to assign some meaning to the cat’s return, but she knows better than to pin her hopes on anything so tenuous as a stray cat’s loyalties. 

The moon scuttles behind a cloud, and the street passes into a darkness so complete that for a moment, Tsukuyo finds it startling. 

“The things I thought he could leave – I didn’t think it included them.”

Hijikata’s voice is low, as if he regrets the words even as he’s saying them. She glances up at him, but all she can see is the side of his face, illuminated in the dark orange glow of his cigarette. 

There’s a moment when Tsukuyo thinks she can read between the lines of what he’s saying: _Everything else, but not them. He could leave his home, this town, the people in it. The people he’s helped. The things he said were important. You. Me._

She pulls in a sudden breath as she glances up at him, her eyes widening. He isn’t looking at her, but then his eyes flicker, closing briefly in something barely longer than a blink, but not before she knows what she’s seen within them. The moon re-emerges, the light stark and white as bones, and no, she thinks, she’s been mistaken – 

She knows she hasn’t been, though, and in that instant of near-complete darkness, she knows she recognised the ache in his eyes: the ache of wanting something and knowing you won’t get it – that it may not even be _good_ for you to get it – but helplessly, desperately, wanting it anyway. 

It’s a feeling she knows – hadn’t she reminded herself, again and again, not to make a fool of herself over him? To close her heart and leave it shut? Or, if she couldn’t do that, to leave the things she’d let inside where they were: whatever words, whatever… _else_ she had for him, the only life they needed was inside the void of her heart, where there was no chance they could hurt her or be burdensome to him, where they could live with the memory of the things he’d said to her the morning after she had slashed Jiraia's neck open to the bone. 

_You, and nobody else chose this life for yourself. Walk tall. Your face isn’t ugly. It’s a pretty face, carrying a clean soul._

But she’d known then and she knows now that when Gintoki had said those things – when he’d done all the things he’d done for her – they had never meant what she wished they meant, and she would never have demanded that they did. Sometimes, though, they had seemed so close to it that she had thought, _If I reached out now, maybe he wouldn’t –_ but that had never been the case, and the knowledge of how narrow the gap between them was only served to make her more aware of how unbridgeable it remained. 

She’d once thought he’d made her weak, but she hadn’t cared – or at least, she’d cared slightly less than she thought she would. For him, she could be weak. She could be foolish. It wasn’t until later that she’d realised she was neither, but by then, it had been too late. 

“I’ll stay here,” she blurts suddenly, feeling her heart beating wildly within her – she doesn’t know what to say or what to do with the understanding that has suddenly dawned within her of just how similar she and Hijikata are after all. “If you want to go. I don’t mind.”

The silence floods in again as soon as she’s spoken, and Tsukuyo regrets having broken it in the first place; somehow, it feels as if this knowledge she wishes she didn’t have had been clear in her voice and now hangs heavily in the air between them, winding itself in amongst the smoke.

For a long moment, Hijikata doesn’t say anything, and then he crushes out his cigarette and lights another, before he mutters, “No, I’ll stay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again -- I appreciate all the kind words and encouragement on part one! Next week, the stunning conclusion :D


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all: the number of chapters has increased. I'M SORRY! But as I was writing it got longer and longer and I thought I'd rather just split it up than risk short-changing anything because I was trying to keep the word count to a reasonable level :| My apologies, the stunning conclusion will actually be next week, but hopefully there's enough in this bit keep things going :D

**VI.**

The first time Tsukuyo returns home to find Seita standing outside the doorway, pouting, his arms crossed over his chest, she assumes Hinowa had sent him out as punishment for a poor report card or for flicking rice at the wall to see if it would stick. As she approaches him, however, there’s something about his stiff-backed posture and the angry spark in his eyes that tells her otherwise. Unease uncoils within her, though Tsukuyo knows that if anything truly serious had happened, Seita wouldn’t be here – he’d either be inside defending Hinowa or running through the streets looking for her.

“There’s a policeman here,” he mutters when she asks him why he’s sulking outside, and for a moment Tsukuyo stiffens, glancing warily towards the door – and then, her stomach twisting, she realises who it is that Seita means.

It’s still strange, though, when she moves to look through the slight gap in the door to see him sitting cross-legged on the tatami of her home; stranger still when, following the light patter of Hinowa’s voice, she hears his low, rasping laugh. Tsukuyo doesn’t think he’s laughed in the whole time she’s known him, but then, Hinowa could charm a laugh out of anyone.

She slides the door open after only the slightest of hesitations, then steps out of her boots and into the room.

“Ah, Tsukki,” Hinowa says, looking up with a bright smile, teapot still in her hands. “I was just telling Hijikata-san you wouldn’t be long, and here you are. Come, sit down and have some tea.”

Tsukuyo sits, because she’s not sure what else to do – she _wants_ to ask him why he’s here, what he thinks he’s doing, and why he’s talking to Hinowa, but she grits her teeth and holds her tongue. She prefers not to cause unpleasant scenes in front of Hinowa and Seita, to keep them away from that side of her life, even though certainly neither of them have any illusions about the Hyakka and what they do. She dithers a moment longer before she settles, watching Hijikata from the corner of her eye as Hinowa pours her tea. Now that she looks at him, he seems uncomfortable, his eyes lowered as he sips his tea, and she wonders if he regrets coming and might have left if not for – she imagines – Hinowa insisting he stay and accept her hospitality. She darts her eyes away and tries not to let how unsettled she is show on her face.

It’s not as if they’re strangers anymore; if anything, Tsukuyo feels as if she knows him too well, without really knowing anything about him at all. They’ve spent enough evenings smoking side-by-side in the alley across from Otose’s place. She feels her face colouring as she thinks of it, though it’s been going on long enough that she’s not sure why she should feel embarrassed about it now – and Otose must know they’re there, if only because the cat woman she lives with keeps coming over to try to beg cigarettes from Hijikata. This feels different, however – she would never have expected him to come here, to her home. Him being here feels almost like dragging the things she’s put away out of sight back into the open, as if the thing that links her to him must be obvious to everyone when they’re seen together. The alley across from the Yorozuya Gin-chan feels like shared territory, or at least a place where they’re both equally intruders. If she’s being honest, she’s not sure why she keeps going. Otose doesn’t need them, that much is clear, and it’s certainly not for the lure of his conversation.

Tsukuyo stares into her cup of tea, at the bubbles that drift across its surface. If it’s not for the lure of his conversation, then it must be for the lure of his silence, she thinks, raising the cup to her lips to hide her sudden need to swallow heavily.

Hinowa eventually moves away, going to the kitchen with a promise to return with something to eat. Tsukuyo is gripping her cup of tea so hard that she’s worried it may crack when she finally looks up at Hijikata and asks him, “Is there a reason you’re here?”

Hijikata at least has the decency to look uncomfortable – he takes a packet of cigarettes from his sleeve, and then, glancing up at the gap in the curtain that Hinowa disappeared through, puts them away again. Finally, he raises his eyes to look her in the face, clearing his throat.

“There’s something I need your help with,” he says.

She blinks, staring at him – but somewhere inside her mind she already knows she’s going to say yes.

Still, she lowers her eyes, sips her tea slowly, and makes him wait before she says, “Fine. Tell me more.”

**VII.**

Maybe Hijikata had taken what she’d said about the Shinsengumi pulling his corpse out of the harbour to heart, or maybe Kondou had said something to him, the same way Hinowa had, in her own way, stepped in for her. Tsukuyo feels ashamed when she thinks about how obvious her every thought must have been to Hinowa, and how much worry she must have caused her. She doesn’t imagine that Kondou would have been as subtle about things as Hinowa was, however, and it’s a strange and somewhat uncomfortable moment when she finds herself picturing the former Shinsengumi commander taking his wayward vice chief to one side and saying, _Stop giving me reasons to think you’re going to turn up dead_.

In any case, the times when a whole week passes and Tsukuyo doesn’t return home to find Seita sulking, refusing to go inside until after _the police_ have left, are weeks when she finds herself wondering where Hijikata has got to. Or she finds herself looking for reasons to go find him.

_Why’s he always here?_ Seita had asked her once, lip curled, his eyes averted, small fists clenched by his sides.

_He’s not,_ Tsukuyo had said, as she pulled her hair up, clipping it into place. Pausing, she’d glanced down at him. _And you should be more polite._

Seita had only pouted at that, and Hinowa had laughed and said he was at a difficult age. But still, it rankles her that Seita should think that, even if she knows it’s not true, and even if she’s not exactly sure why.

It’s not that she needs Hijikata’s help – she’s been keeping the streets of Yoshiwara clean (or what passes for clean in Yoshiwara) her entire adult life. She has relied on the Hyakka, of course, relied on all the women of Yoshiwara, relied on Hinowa. She’s relied on Gintoki. But the years she had spent trying to cut out the unnecessary parts of herself – the parts of her that craved what Jiraia had told her she had no right to ask for – are over now, and she knows it’s more foolish not to take help when it’s on offer than to risk looking weak.

No one is in charge now, and the streets are full of people who see such times as an opportunity rather than a disaster. She has no idea where Hijikata is getting his information from, though it’s unerringly correct, but Tsukuyo has her own spies – Hyakka trained to track and follow, courtesans with sharp ears and sharper wits who know how to coax information out of their visitors.

Between the two, there’s more than enough to be getting on with: a Hitotsubashi scion who’s hoarding rice in a storehouse on the east side of the city while there are people starving; smugglers who’re trying to arm some delusional Jouishishi who’ve started worshipping Utsuro in a tunnel under the train station; racketeers attempting to shake down courtesans; Amanto forming gangs around abandoned houses and extorting money to let the former inhabitants go in and sift through the rubble for what possessions might still remain to them.

More often than not it’s something an experienced swordsman could probably deal with alone, but still, Hijikata comes to her, asks her if she has some time; she rarely does, but she goes with him anyway. Now that he has apparently decided to leave the bazooka at home, they work well together, a combination of aggression and stealth, his sword and her kunai.

Tsukuyo would never say she enjoys spilling blood, even as she recognises the necessity of it. But there is satisfaction to be drawn from knowing those who’ve spent their lives preying on others will never do so again. She sees it in Hijikata’s face too when she raises her eyes after a fight, her breath still heavy in her throat, her heart still pounding – and she wonders if _that_ is what Gintoki saw in him that made him something more than simply a surly prick in a uniform.

They haven’t really had a proper conversation, and Tsukuyo realises that what she sees, she filters mostly through the lens of Gintoki’s eyes – Hijikata is a surly prick; he had continued to let Gintoki cavort around Edo at his leisure despite the fact he must surely know better; he nonetheless owes Gintoki unspecified favours… but she can think of very few people in Edo who don’t owe Gintoki _something_. When she looks at him, she sometimes finds herself trying to put herself in Gintoki’s place, trying to imagine Gintoki’s thoughts, why he would choose to spend time with, of all people, someone who could be so dangerous to him. But then, Gintoki had always enjoyed walking that finest of lines, stupidly provoking things, sticking his fingers where they didn’t belong, and shaking trees that definitely didn’t need to be shaken. He’d probably never seen a cop he didn’t want to mouth off at, and the only thing that – sometimes – kept him in check was being too lazy to deal with the consequences.

Gintoki left so many pieces of himself with the people he helped that it was inevitable that he had ended up in everyone’s hearts – she hadn’t meant it quite so literally, of course, both when she’d said _everyone_ and _in their hearts_, but it does make her wonder what parts of Gintoki Hijikata had seen that had led him to the same place as the one she finds herself in now. She knows where her own feelings spring from and can remember, she thinks, the first time she’d understood the meaning behind the clench in her chest, the shortness of her breath when Gintoki turned to look at her over his shoulder, giving her the lazy half-smile that made her grind her teeth in fury.

She catches herself wondering, one night as she makes her way back to Yoshiwara, wiping some blood from the blade of her tantou, if Hijikata can identify a similar moment in his own memories, or what part of himself Gintoki revealed that sparked it. And she wonders if between the two of them they might piece together a more complete picture of the past that Gintoki had kept so guarded – the Amanto Wars, the Jouishishi, the death of his master – though she knows that she will never ask, and Hijikata would likely never tell her.

Tonight, after they’ve finished off the last of the bandits who’ve been shaking down the fruit merchants, Tsukuyo is surprised when, instead of nodding to her and thanking her for a job well done, he lingers a moment, lighting a cigarette and asking her if she has anywhere to be. Tsukuyo hesitates, somewhat perplexed, before she says, “Only back home.”

Hijikata nods, exhaling. For a moment, she thinks he’s going to ask her something – the smoke from his cigarette hangs in the air between them like a coiled, pale, gently writhing creature, before it dissipates into the silence. Tsukuyo realises she’s holding her breath, a prickle of sweat suddenly dampening the small of her back and the nape of her neck, a tightness creeping up her throat.

The moment feels like it’s waiting – a pause in which someone else might speak, but there’s only the two of them here, and eventually Tsukuyo drops her eyes, feeling her stomach clench.

“I should go.”

He nods. “Me too. God knows what Sougo’s up to.”

She doesn’t know why that’s Hijikata’s responsibility – Sougo might _look_ like a brat, but he is apparently old enough to take care of himself – but she nods to him and turns away, willing herself not to look back.

Tsukuyo no longer thinks about the scars on her face, unless she’s given a reason to – but later that night as she lets her hair down for bed, she runs her finger lightly over the one on her forehead, feeling the way it puckers her skin where it was inexpertly stitched. She jerks her hand away from her face, blinking, and turns away from the mirror. A cold, unsettled feeling creeps over her as she lies down on her futon, and it’s a long while before she finds her way to sleep.

**VIII.**

“I don’t like it,” Tsukuyo says, as she taps the ash from her kiseru, gazing across the street. The property looks like most of the others here in the expensive part of Edo – which had, of course, been spared the worst of the destruction. Wide gate, high walls, the peaks of the slanted, tiled roofs of the main house and outbuildings visible above them. It’s clear that no one has lived here for some time, however, if only because clouds of late-flowering jasmine overflow the walls and spill out onto the street in a way they’d never have been allowed to before, but presumably the gardeners had left when their masters had fled the city or died.

She looks across at him. Maybe he’s just come from whatever last gasp of officialdom the Shinsengumi still retain, because he’s wearing his uniform pants and shirt, though the sleeves are rolled up and the collar open as a concession to the heat of the evening.

“Seems very quiet.” He glances at her. “What do you think?”

Tsukuyo thinks she heard a good cover story – anyone who can afford houses like these ones has long since packed up and left for Kyou. It’s natural they would want all the priceless items they left behind delivered to them without having to actually set foot in the city themselves, so no one would question boxes coming in or out of the property. The houses are big enough and abandoned enough to be tempting as a base of operations for any criminal group who want to pose as workmen or who need a place big enough to house large groups of people. Especially when what’s being transported in those crates isn’t heirlooms at all, but people – mainly girls – in desperate enough situations here in Edo that they’ll listen to any promise of the glamorous life waiting for them beyond the stars, if they’ll just pay a small fee to someone to get them off-planet.

_They could have come to me,_ Tsukuyo thinks, as she tucks her pipe into her obi. Yoshiwara will always be a home to women who have nowhere else to go, whether they want to go into its traditional trade or not.

It’s not that that she doesn’t like, however – it’s the stillness in the air, how abandoned this place feels. There’s nothing and no one here. Usually she’d find the idea comforting – no one necessarily needs to know what they do – but now it’s simply unsettling.

She frowns. It seems almost too convenient – _too_ designed to appeal specifically to her particular sense of outrage. It feels like the men the courtesan had reported to her had been almost too brazen about it, talking too loudly in a Yoshiwara bar about their lucrative new trade. It feels like a lure, drawing her in.

_And yet...._

If the tip-off is correct, can she really risk more women being enticed here, only to end up disappearing to who knows where?

Tsukuyo flexes her fingers, taking a deep breath. “I still don’t like it. But.”

He nods. “But.”

They both know they’re going to go inside and look around. They both know it’s a bad idea, even as Tsukuyo’s boots are skimming up the vertical surface of the outer wall, even before she lands in the overgrown garden. Hijikata lands heavily behind her a moment later, having scrambled his way up the wall, making more noise than she really thinks is reasonable.

The smell of the jasmine is sweet and heady, and the humid summer night feels thick and damp against her skin. She pauses, crouched by a drooping, dying maple, and waits.

Nothing moves; if the story of the trafficked girls is true, they’re long gone now, along with the men who’d brought them here. Tsukuyo glances at Hijikata, seeing at once that he’s had the same thought. Either there’s no one here and it’s pointless for them to stay, or there is and –

She’s almost not fast enough to dart out of the way as the man descends suddenly from the roof of one of the broken-down outbuildings; he’s silent enough that Tsukuyo thinks he _must_ be formally trained, except for the fact that when he clips her shoulder with his baton he makes no attempt to press his advantage, instead letting her roll away, putting enough distance between them to give her time to collect herself and catch her breath. Or, possibly, he’s simply arrogant enough to think he doesn’t need to.

Tsukuyo narrows her eyes. She’d been right, then – it _was_ a setup, and this is an ambush. She grits her teeth as more men emerge from the outbuilding like shadows in the darkness, clearly having decided to dispense with subtlety, now that the element of surprise has been lost.

“You two have given us a lot of trouble,” the man who’d leapt down from the roof says, straightening, his heavy baton resting in his palm. Tsukuyo’s shoulder aches where he’d clipped her, though she can feel she’s not badly injured. If she’d been a second slower, though, she’d have had a broken collarbone, at best. In the darkness, she can see the cruel curve of the man’s smile. “That ends tonight, one way or another. You got it?”

Behind her, she can sense Hijikata lowering himself into a fighting stance, shoulders turning, left foot sliding forward. She already knows what these men will do. It’s page one, lesson one in the book of how to fight – _when facing an enemy of superior skill, overwhelm them with numbers_ – and the only thing to do is get in first and even out the playing field.

“I guess it will,” she murmurs, before she reaches into her obi, filling her hand with the handles of her kunai and flinging them forward.

The man with the baton goes down with a throaty gurgle and a spray of blood, and Hijikata takes out two before they’ve finished drawing their swords – she supposes that if he weren’t who he is that would be considered too underhanded for him to retain his good name, but the Shinsengumi have never fought clean, and she has no room to talk, since shinobi were invented for fighting dirty. She dives low, kicking out a third man’s knees. He’s met with the point of a kunai in his shoulder before his body hits the ground, and by the time he’s finished falling she’s already moved on.

Distantly, she’s aware of the wide slash of Hijikata’s sword, the gush of blood and the thud of bodies, but she’s just going to have to trust him to look after himself for the moment, since she has her hands completely full. She throws the last of her kunai and reaches behind her for the twin tantou she keeps at the back of her obi, bringing them forward across her chest – it’s enough to make the man in front of her back off, but she doesn’t see the man to her left until it’s a second too late to fully avoid the swing of his bat.

She turns and catches it on the side of her ribcage, a sick throb of pain radiating through her. Despite the hit forcing the air from her lungs, she steps inside his second swing, blocking with her forearm, the impact jarring her bones. But the tantou in her left hand finds the soft skin beneath his jaw a moment later, and the bat drops from his hands, clattering against a paving stone.

Adrenaline rushes through her – even so, she tries to incapacitate where she can, but it’s simply not always possible in a fight where your opponent is making a sincere and protracted effort to kill you. She’ll slice tendons rather than arteries, break collarbones, slash the backs of knees. None of those things will kill – necessarily – but the men certainly can’t fight afterwards and instead lie on the ground in groaning heaps, their blood seeping into the soil of the garden.

She doesn’t see what direction it comes from when a body hurtles into her, ramming its shoulder into her chest; taken unawares, she stumbles back, her tantou slipping from her fingers as she fights for balance, her feet slipping in the earth the fight has churned up. The rough wood of a thick pillar slams into her spine, knocking the breath out of her as the man’s forearm comes up, pressing against her throat, forcing her head up and closing her windpipe. Tsukuyo grapples at his arm, her feet sliding on the blood-soaked earth, but in a contest of brute strength she’s outmatched. Gasping for breath, she raises her foot, going for the crotch, but the heel of her boot grinds into his thigh instead. His face twitches in pain, but he doesn’t falter, his eyes still staring into hers. She struggles against him, clawing ineffectively at his neck, her lungs burning with untaken breaths. As black spots begin to darken her vision, she can see his grin turn feral, widening in triumph –

At least until he suddenly stiffens, grin becoming an open-mouthed expression of surprise. Warm droplets of blood spatter across Tsukuyo’s shoulders and throat as the man slumps forward, a sword embedded in his spine, his arm at last releasing her.

Tears spring into her eyes as she hauls in a gasping, painful breath, her knees going weak with the relief of it, and she scrubs them away impatiently. It’s just from the lack of oxygen, she knows, but still, she doesn’t want them leaving tracks through the drying blood that covers her face. When she looks up, her vision still blurry, she sees Hijikata levering his sword out of the man’s back. He seems to know better than to ask her if she’s all right, but she nods to him anyway, though her fingers linger on the tenderness at her throat.

“And you?” she asks, just to prove she can speak without her voice shaking.

He wipes his mouth and spits, a stream of blood and possibly a tooth flying off into the wildness of the garden. “I’ll have to go to the dentist,” he says, as if that’s the worst thing about the entire evening.

Behind her, she hears men groaning, so some of them clearly aren’t dead – and aside from that, they may have friends nearby.

“We should go,” she says, feeling her knees wobble. Hijikata glances at her, frowning, and reaches out as if he’s about to help her support her own weight, but he stops at the last moment when she shoots him a glare.

“I’m fine,” Tsukuyo mutters. “Really. Let’s just go.”

“You’re bleeding. A lot.” He raises a hand, reaching towards her as if to touch her jaw, but then he pulls back, swallowing, and points instead. “There.”

Tsukuyo frowns, about to say _I’m not_ when she feels a warm trickle down the side of her neck; when she raises her hand to the back of her head just behind her ear, it comes away wet. She stares, the blood on her hand black in the paleness of the moonlight. She doesn’t recall receiving the blow. Even now, she can’t feel the pain.

“Oh.”

She keeps staring down at her fingers until she feels his hand around her wrist, lifting her arm and pulling it over his shoulder, his other hand on her waist. She opens her mouth to protest, to tell him to let her go and stop coddling her, but then he says, quietly, “Let’s go,” and she stumbles forward with him, her hip knocking against his thigh.

This is fine if she considers it payback for the time she dragged him out of the harbour, she decides, as they make their way through the mess of the garden to the side gate of the compound. Clearly it’s where the men who ambushed them entered since it’s torn halfway off its hinges, and Hijikata brings it the full way down with a well-placed kick.

“We need to get cleaned up,” he mutters, as they emerge into the small alley between this property and the one beside it. They’re leaving a long trail of blood behind them, and Tsukuyo knows they won’t get far, limping through the streets like this.

“These houses are abandoned, aren’t they?”

He pauses, head turning slightly to glance down at her, but then he nods. The house next door is just as huge, the garden left to run just as wild. Conveniently, part of the outer wall has collapsed, so it’s not even particularly difficult to get into, and then to find the outbuilding that had once been the servants’ baths. Inside, Hijikata lights a lamp with his cigarette lighter, casting a golden glow across the room. Tsukuyo begins to head to the water pump, but he beats her to it, grabbing a wooden bucket and filling it.

“Just sit down,” he tells her, and Tsukuyo wants to argue with him but finds herself sinking to the floor anyway. In the lamplight, she can see the bloody stains on his white shirt, the open slash on his right shoulder, the dark footprint he leaves from a left sock that must be soaked with blood.

Now that the adrenaline is wearing off, her head wound is starting to throb painfully. When she unpins her hair, a bloody hank of it comes down with her hand; for a moment, Tsukuyo stares down at it sitting in her palm, as if she doesn’t recognise it as part of herself – though is it truly a part of her, anyway? What is hair but the sloughing off of dead cells, pieces of itself that the body had already discarded, some liminal thing that exists on the boundary of life and death? She drops it without another thought, tossing it down on the floor by her boots.

Raising her hand to probe the cut with her fingers, Tsukuyo realises what a closely run thing it had been: an inch lower and it would have sliced open her carotid artery; a hairsbreadth deeper and it would have bitten into the bone of her spine. Either way, she’d most likely be dead, having gasped out her last breath in the garden.

The bucket sloshes down onto the floor beside her, followed a moment later by Hijikata – he’s already torn a strip from the hem of his shirt and is dipping it into the water when he says, “Turn your head.”

She winces as the movement pulls at the sliced-open flesh on her neck, and then winces again as his fingers lift her hair out of the way to dab around the wound. Cool water trickles down her neck, over her shoulder, and dampens the collar of her kimono, and Tsukuyo suppresses the urge to shiver.

“It may not need stitches.” Hijikata’s breath is warm on the side of her throat as he leans in to inspect the injury. She swallows as her skin prickles into goosebumps, and she leans away, pressing her fingernails into her palms. “But you’ll need to get someone else to look at it. I’ll just wrap it for now.”

“I can do it,” she says roughly, jerking away from him. Vulnerability suddenly wells up inside her, and she tamps it down as quickly as it comes. She’s had worse injuries; she’s had worse fights. She doesn’t need his help. She’s patched herself up in alleyways with whatever she’s had to hand, before finding her limping way home. Jiraia beat her worse than this.

She tears a strip off her own sleeve to wind around her head, not caring how she looks. He doesn’t make a move to stop her – and yes, she’s aware she’s being stubborn, but right now, she doesn’t care.

“And what about you?” she asks, as she tucks the strip of her sleeve under itself to secure it around her head. “What about _this?_”

She jabs a finger at the deep slice on his shoulder. He glances at it as if noticing it for the first time.

“It’ll be fi–” he starts to say, but stops when he sees the expression on her face. “But you can patch it up. If you want.”

Tsukuyo grinds her teeth – he says it as if he’s doing her a favour, that the only reason to get it bandaged is to make _her_ feel better.

Well, two can play that game.

“Fine,” she says. “If you need me to do it, I don’t mind. It’d be annoying if you fainted from blood loss and I had to drag you back through Edo.”

“I’m sorry, _what?_” he says, but she’s already dabbing at the wound with the dampened edge of her kimono, cleaning away the crust of dried blood that has formed around its edges.

It’s been a while since she last tended someone’s wounds – she doesn’t have a lot of skill at it, she has to admit. She hears Hijikata’s sharp intake of breath when she presses too hard, and she frowns, leaning forward. She can almost taste the metallic tang of blood that hangs in the air, the salt of perspiration, the thick, damp scent of the wood of the baths. It reminds her of all the times she’s done this alone, not wanting to wake Hinowa and trouble her for help.

And it reminds her of the loneliness of her life and how often she has thought, _If only –_

“Your bandage is coming undone.”

“What?” She raises her head, scowling in irritation. She feels his hand in her hair, tucking the end of her makeshift bandage back in. Their eyes meet, and he doesn’t take his hand away.

Tsukuyo blinks, unsure, and is suddenly very, very aware of his breath on her face, of the scent of blood that covers them both. Of how death is only ever a breath away.

She isn’t certain it’s a kiss until after it starts – it hadn’t been her intention, and she can’t even say which one of them moved first or if they both did, together. It doesn’t seem to matter, either way – her lips press against his, hard and graceless and messy, his hand on her cheek, hers on his shoulder.

Their teeth click painfully against each other when – involuntarily, she thinks – Hijikata leans back against the wall behind him, pulling her with him. The impact is jarring, but Tsukuyo’s mind is too blank to care, and she allows herself to be pulled forward, kneeling on the floor, her thighs on either side of his hips. Closing her eyes, she curls her fingers through the sweat-dampened hair at the nape of his neck, and consciously wills herself not to think. She kisses him again to drown out the sound of her loneliness, beating in her ears.

Her hands slide down, fingertips coming to rest in the hollow between his collarbones before tangling in the front of his shirt. She can feel his left hand moving, fingers sliding slowly up the bare skin of her thigh, almost hesitantly. Tsukuyo doesn’t want to think about what that might mean – if her woman’s body is different from what he’s used to, given what she knows –

The thought is buried before it can be completed. His hand is tangling in her hair as she opens her mouth against his, feeling as if she wants to drown in it. He tastes of blood, but even that feels fitting in its way – they have both, in their separate spheres, lived by violence, and a willingness to use it. The taste of it on her tongue is nothing new. 

Pulling back, she looks down at him, her breath heavy in her throat. His face is only inches from hers, and she hears it when he runs his tongue over his lips, his breath hitching as she shifts against him. The air is too warm, and her skin feels too tight; the lamplight flickers, making the shadows jump, and she can’t bring herself to meet his eyes. Her tongue feels thick and awkward in her mouth, but she doesn’t have anything to say anyway. She shuffles forward on her knees, and his hand presses against the small of her back, drawing her closer. It’s too fast, but if she stops to think, she knows she won’t –

As she fumbles with the buttons on his shirt, he suddenly says, “I’ve never –” before cutting himself off, swallowing.

“Neither have I,” she tells him – but her curiosity gets the better of her after a moment. She hasn’t met a lot of men with those kinds of scruples, and she’s heard women who charge like wounded bulls for their time say they’d drop their rates for him. She isn’t used to looking at men in that way – it’s never interested her. But she has, on occasion, found herself looking at him, and thinking _If Gintoki liked him, I could understand it._ She looks up at him now, at the way the shadows fall into the half-circles beneath his eyes. “Never?”

He looks away, his expression hidden in the half-light. “Once, years ago, my boss brought me to Yoshiwara, but I couldn’t go through with it.” His throat jumps as he swallows. “There was someone else I –”

It’s as if his words break whatever haze they’ve been wandering through these last few minutes. She stares down at him, unmoving. She feels caught here, in these eternal, breathless seconds, her fists still bunched in his shirt. Finally, she forces herself to relax them, and his hand drops away from her thigh.

“This is a mistake,” she says after a long, silent moment, and she can see in his eyes that he knows she’s right.

She rolls over, moving off him, and they sit together with their backs to the wall, not looking at each other. She almost wants to ask him _Who was it,_ but at the same time, she’s not sure she wants to know. He’d said it was years ago, so perhaps it was someone from his past, someone she wouldn’t know. In the end, it’s none of her business, just as whatever he might feel for Gintoki is not, strictly speaking, any of her business. To be honest, she’s not even sure it’s important: perhaps the only thing she needs to know is that he’s here with her now, sitting with her in the swiftly dying lamplight, as the flame burns down on its wick.

Tsukuyo stares at the wall across from them, her heartbeat thrumming in her ears. She can’t bring herself to look at him, but she can move her hand the minute distance across the floor to where his sits beside it, to tangle their fingers together.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What can I say, 'I'm gonna go search for Yorozuya' slayed me.

**IX.**

Tsukuyo only has to take one look at the men who wander through the streets of Yoshiwara to know what a powerful aphrodisiac loneliness can be. For a while, she had told herself that this was the reason she had found herself thinking of Gintoki on the evenings when patrol was quiet or when she was lying alone on her futon in winter, shivering even beneath three blankets. Not love – not even lust, really. Just a mistake, brought on by having too much time on her hands in which to think, something her brain threw up to confuse and distract her while she was trying to do her job. 

Just because that had turned out not to be the case with Gintoki doesn’t mean it isn’t still true: loneliness can make someone behave in the stupidest of ways, see things that aren’t there, _feel_ things that aren’t –

Tsukuyo cuts herself off before she can finish the thought, swallowing, feeling her cheeks colour. She wants to chew at her lower lip, but she forces her features into what she _hopes_ is a mask of calm, reflecting nothing of the churning in her gut or the tightness in her chest. She doesn’t want to think about this. Her brain’s only useful to her if it’s being used to command her limbs – thinking has never led her anywhere good. 

She doesn’t allow herself to hesitate before she rounds the final corner leading to her home. Seita isn’t kicking his heels in the dirt outside, and Tsukuyo isn’t sure what to name the feeling that stitches itself into her heart in that moment. It’s not relief, and it’s not regret. She can’t even say it’s disappointed expectation. She hasn’t seen Hijikata for several days, and she can’t even tell if she wants to, even though it would be foolish to let something like that come between them – whatever stupidity that loneliness and a sudden reminder of her own mortality had caused. They have done a lot of good together. And she likes him. 

She’s had so few friends over the course of her life – or at least, few that she had realised were friends at the time – that perhaps she hadn’t known it for what it was at first. But she _does_ like him. As a friend. 

_As a_ friend, she repeats to herself as she slides open the front door, steps out of her boots – and looks up to see Hijikata sitting on the tatami in the living room, a cup of Hinowa’s tea halfway to his lips. 

For a moment she simply stands there staring at him, as he stares back at her, though what _he_ has to look so surprised about she’s sure she doesn’t know – it’s _her_ house. Vaguely, she’s aware of the faded bruises that still mottle his jaw and the fact that his hair has grown longer since the first time she saw him here, and now reaches down his neck almost to his collar. But mostly, her mind is blank, her muscles frozen. Tsukuyo has the fleeting thought that this might continue indefinitely, if not for the fact that Hinowa and Seita appear from the kitchen just at that moment with a tray of senbei. 

“Oh –” Hinowa’s soft exclamation is the only thing that breaks the silence. Tsukuyo knows that Hinowa _is_ capable of detecting awkward tension in the air, even if she usually chooses to gloss over it with her charm – but this time she seems to withdraw a little, placing the senbei on the table, before saying brightly, “Well. I won’t interrupt – in fact, it’s a lovely day, and I feel like going out into the sunshine. Seita, won’t you come with me?”

Evidently, Seita knows well enough when one of Hinowa’s suggestions isn’t really a suggestion at all, because he follows her without so much as a peep of protest, putting on his sandals before guiding her chair down the ramp and out the front door. 

None of it can have taken more than thirty seconds, but to Tsukuyo, it might as well have been a year. When they’re finally gone, she still finds herself dithering as if this isn’t the entrance to her own home, before Hijikata takes a breath and says, “Your hair – it looks... good.”

Tsukuyo blinks, raising her hand to where her hair now sits in a bob just above her jaw – Hinowa, with a lot of muttering, had done what she could with it, but Tsukuyo honestly hasn’t thought much about it. The only thing of importance is that the cut across the back of her head is healing well. 

She’s guessing, though, that Hijikata hasn’t come here to compliment her haircut. She steps onto the tatami, kneeling across from him. It’s good he’s come here, she thinks, looking down at her lap. It means he doesn’t mind what happened – they can forget about it. They can go back to what they were doing before. It means nothing. 

“What’s happening?” she asks, when she thinks she can trust her voice enough to speak. 

There’s a slight pause. 

“I’m leaving Edo,” he says. 

Tsukuyo looks up, blinking. She opens her mouth, but the only question she could ask would make her sound inane. But he reads the question in her eyes anyway, before he looks away, taking out a cigarette and lighting it.

“It’s been decided things might go easier if the Shinsengumi – _ex-_Shinsengumi – made themselves scarce for a while. Politically speaking.”

“Politically?” she asks, though she knows what he’s talking about: the nascent government that’s dragging itself out of the ashes of the old. No shougun, no Bakufu – something new, something different, and something that would prefer to distance itself from the chaos of the recent past. 

Hijikata doesn’t answer her. He takes a drag on his cigarette, having apparently decided it’s okay to smoke as long as Hinowa isn’t here to see it.

“So where will you go?” she asks finally, looking up and catching his eye, if only for a moment.

He doesn’t answer her right away. They sit in silence, smoke hanging in the air between them like a scarf. She waits, suddenly not sure she wants to know the answer to her question – it feels almost as if she’s asked some other question entirely or inadvertently spoken about something she shouldn’t. 

“During the clean-up,” Hijikata eventually says, voice low, “we were going through the rubble of some buildings the Bakufu was using to store old documents – records dating back to Sada Sada’s time.” He pauses. “The Kansei Purge. Government lists of dissidents, arrest and execution orders. Things the Tenshouin Naraku carried out.”

Tsukuyo is quiet, staring at him. Jiraia might have wished for her to grow up ignorant, but she can read and has educated herself about this country’s history, and she knows about the senseless brutality of the purges – and she knows firsthand what the Naraku are capable of. 

She waits. Hijikata lights another cigarette.

“I didn’t know what I was reading until I’d read it,” he says, and Tsukuyo believes she can hear the unspoken, _And I wish now I hadn’t._

“There was a school. A teacher. He was arrested – several times. But he kept going back to his school. No matter how many times they arrested him, he kept going back to his students. Until one time, he didn’t come back, and his students went to get him back.” He pauses, tapping ash from his cigarette, though he doesn’t lift it to his lips again. “Though it didn’t do any good, in the end.”

She could ask, _Why are you telling me this? What has it got to do with anything?_ but she knows there’s only one reason why he’d be relating such a story to her. Tsukuyo feels sweat prickle at the back of her neck, sliding down her spine. She hears her own voice as she crouches beside Gintoki: _Gintoki! Did your master –_

Her breath catches, her throat closing too tight to let it pass. She knows what Hijikata is saying, and why he’d rather not know. Why it would have been better if he’d never stumbled across those papers in the course of cleaning up yet another of the messes left behind by the Tendoushuu. For a moment, anger flashes through her – _Why did you make me know it too?_ – but then it’s gone. She can’t truly blame him. 

Tsukuyo looks down to find her fists clenched in her lap, her nails cutting crescents into her palms. With conscious effort she relaxes her hands, spreads her fingers out across the tops of her thighs.

“I understand,” she says, voice soft. She swallows, forcing herself to look at his face. But he doesn’t look up, his head downturned. 

“They’re at least giving me the choice of where I go, as long as it’s not Edo,” Hijikata says. He crushes out the cigarette he’s let burn down to the filter, not meeting her gaze as he lights another. “I heard the countryside down south is nice. The school’s not there anymore, but I figure it’s as good a place as any to start.” 

_To start…?_ she thinks, blinking. Hijikata still doesn’t look up, the fall of his hair obscuring his eyes. When he speaks again, his voice is barely higher than a low mutter. 

“I’ll drag him back and dump him on your doorstep.”

She holds in her exhale, but only just. She opens her mouth, her mind blank, her ears filled with the thudding of her heart.

“What makes you think I’d want such a mess on my doorstep? Dump him on your own.” She can hear the shake in her voice, and she pauses just long enough – _just_ long enough – to watch his eyes widen as they finally flick towards her, watch the way his throat moves as he swallows. “Or into the first ditch you come to. I don’t care.”

They don’t look at each other as Hijikata finishes his cigarette, crushing it out in the ashtray Hinowa always lays out when he’s here, even though before now he’s never used it. Tsukuyo knows she should say something, offer something – but she feels almost as if she cannot take in everything he’s told her. It feels like the sun: look too long or too directly at it, and it will leave you blinded. 

“What about your gorilla and your brat?” she blurts out finally, as the silence becomes unbearable. “Do you trust them to look after themselves?”

“No. But Kondou-san is in someone else’s hands now. And Sougo never listens to me anyway.”

She looks down at her hands, still resting in her lap. They look calm; no one watching her from afar would guess at the way her heart is beating. 

The words _I could come with you_ rise in her mind. Somehow, she knows already the possibility is there, hanging formlessly in the air between them – all she’d have to do is say the words to give it shape. For a moment, she can feel herself trembling on the edge of it – _It would be easy, to give myself this one thing_ – before she quietly, gently closes herself off from it. Hijikata’s not leaving by choice – he’s leaving because he has to. For her to go, when there are so many people here who rely on her… it would be nothing but selfish.

She looks up at him, and she thinks she can see expectation and maybe even hope in his eyes. It doesn’t matter, though, Tsukuyo decides – saying it would only place upon him the burden of saying either _yes_ or _no_, and right now, she can recognise that neither of them know which would be the more difficult answer. 

Perhaps he hesitates a moment longer before he rises and picks up his sword from where he’d left it by the door, and perhaps it takes her a moment longer to rise than she wants it to. He pauses as he steps into his sandals, turning to look at her, his hand on the door.

“I meant what I said.”

She returns his gaze levelly. “So did I.” 

So they’re at an impasse, it seems, and there’s nothing left to say. Tsukuyo crosses her arms over her chest, wishing she was better with conversation – that she could give him some sweet parting words like Hinowa would, or say something flippant and infuriating, like –

“Take care,” she says, just as he begins to open the door. He doesn’t answer her, but he turns back slightly, nodding, before stepping out into the street and closing the door behind him.

Tsukuyo forces herself to count to five before she steps down into the entryway and opens the door to look after him – but he’s already gone, swallowed up by the crowds of the Yoshiwara street. 

**X.**

Tsukuyo wakes in the quiet dawn, just as the first ragged stripe of sunlight begins to struggle its way through the gap in her window. To be honest, she’s surprised to find herself waking at all – she doesn’t remember going to sleep, though she remembers putting her head down on the pillow and staring at the wall for what seemed like hours, listening to her heartbeat drumming in her ears. 

When she sits up, she’s surprised at how unfatigued she feels. But despite the lightness of her limbs, her head feels blank, as if she’s holding back her thoughts – though perhaps it’s better that way. She’s used to saving her thoughts for when she has time to think them. Rising, she opens her window, letting the first of the day’s light in, and looks out over the streets of Yoshiwara, which are only just now beginning to subside after a long night’s activities. Tsukuyo only pauses here a moment, but it’s long enough; she takes a breath and feels her heart tighten within her, and she has to press her fingers against the wood of the window frame before she can force herself to turn away and cross the room to kneel before the butsudan, bowing her head.

But focus eludes her, and eventually she slides away from the shrine, not wanting to sully it with things as trivial as the loneliness that curls inside her – loneliness she doesn’t even feel entitled to, since she has Hinowa and Seita, and every other friend she’s made. She has the women of the Hyakka. She has the streets of Yoshiwara; she has the city of Edo. She has the promises she made, spoken and unspoken, to people both present and absent. 

It’s better not to think about what Hijikata said to her before he’d left yesterday. She understands him, and she knows he understands her, and that’s why they both know the words are futile. Kneeling in the half-light, Tsukuyo can almost let her mind wander to other places, other possibilities; almost without her conscious will, she raises her hand and touches her lips briefly, remembering the warmth of his against them. She wonders if that had been her one kiss to give, gone now, brief as a summer lightning strike... but as she clenches her fist, she finds the kiss she would have spent on Gintoki is still there within her – or perhaps it’s only that she can now bring herself to believe she has the space inside her heart for more than one kiss, spent or unspent. It seems like a trivial distinction when she thinks about it. 

She’s not waiting; waiting implies something static, unmoving – a pause between breaths, the moment between one life-giving inhalation and the next. And this is not what she is doing. 

Edo is remaking itself before her very eyes, becoming something more and perhaps something better than it was before – and the only thing she needs to do is stand up and put one foot in front of the other and keep her eyes focused forward. This isn’t the first time she’s forced open the door to a new world and, after hesitating a moment on the threshold, forced herself to step out into it. 

It is the cusp of a new day; she rises and goes to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again so much for reading this! To be honest I wrote this as a bit of self-indulgence, so thank you all for getting in on this with me XD And thank you so much for the comments, kudos, and reads, I'm so happy to know people enjoyed it. 
> 
> After writing a lot of comedy fic for Gintama I wasn't sure how I'd go with something angsty, but it was a lot of fun to write, and I hope the bittersweetness of the ending was okay -- we know it all shakes out in the end :D
> 
> Thank you again so much to Apathy and rabbit_habits for their beta efforts and suggestions and for looking through my very drafty drafts, and deargodwhatisthatthing for the beautiful art <3

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Absence, the highest form of presence](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21281204) by [deargodwhatisthatthing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deargodwhatisthatthing/pseuds/deargodwhatisthatthing)


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